In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The origins of Zen Buddhism are obscured in Buddhist lore and legend. But as is common in the religious tradition, this school traces its origins to the historical Buddha. It is possible to find the key narrative in the sixth case of a text entitled the Mumonkan. In this story the Buddha is giving a sermon to a group of people assembled before him. Rather than giving a verbal discourse on this day, the Buddha holds up a flower before those who have come to hear him. The group of listeners are confused and sit there silently, but the face of a monk named Kasyapa breaks into a smile. Whether this episode ever occurred is impossible to determine . But the story is informative about the nature of Zen Buddhism, because it tells us that the truth cannot be expressed verbally and that the transmission of the truth must be nonverbal. This tale also suggests that the transmission of the teachings of the Buddha is exterior to the corpus of Buddhist scriptures. The emphasis in Zen is on the transmission of the truth from the mind of the enlightened master to the student. If this is the case, it helps us to understand why Kasyapa smiled when the Buddha raised a flower: he was responding directly to the mind of the Buddha. Any search for the historical origins of Zen is a difficult because the legendary founder, Bodhidharma, is probably a composite figure rather than a single, identi fiable, historical teacher. According to the biographical legend, Bodhidharma was born into a Brahmin family living in southern India. For some unknown reason , he traveled to China during the sixth century, and he allegedly had a personal audience with the Emperor Wu (502–550). In response to the emperor’s question about the value of his munificent generosity to Buddhists, Bodhidharma replied that construction projects and reciting of scriptures lacked real merit, and implied that they were a waste of time and resources. Finding the atmosphere in the capital inhospitable, Bodhidharma allegedly crossed the Yangtze River on a reed, found a mountain cave, and remained seated for nine years meditating before a wall until his legs wasted away. There is also a legend that he cut off his 225 12 The No-Narrative of Seated Meditation: Zen eyelids in order to enhance his concentration. After he threw his eyelids out of the cave, they grew into the first tea plants in China—a dubious but colorful tale. While Bodhidharma was absorbed in mediation within his cave, an aspiring student , repeatedly tried to gain his attention, without success. According to legend, the student once waited in a raging snowstorm, hoping to get the attention of Bodhidharma, who finally felt a sense of sympathy for the persistent young man and asked him what he wanted. When he was further rebuffed by the meditating master, Hui-k’o used a knife to cut off his left arm at the elbow, and presented his bloody limb to the meditator. Finally convinced of his seriousness, determination, and sincerity to learn, Bodhidharma accepted him as a student and gave him a new name, Hui-k’o. A former student of Taoism, Hui-k’o (484–590) was forty years old when this encounter occurred. This legend is important for subsequent Zen history, because it begins to establish the pattern of transmission from master to disciple in an unbroken line that extends to the historical Buddha. It is impossible to determine with certainty whether or not the encounter between Bodhidharma and Hui-k’o was an actual occurrence. We do know, however, that some remarkable, courageous, and adventurous monks such as Lokaksena, who arrived in China between 168 to 188 C.E. and translated the Praj ñaparamita Sutra in Eight Thousand Lines, preceded Ch’an/Zen in China. Dharmaraksa , who was another great translator of Indo-Scythian background, followed him. These monks were eventually followed by such figures as Kumarajiva (344– 409 or 413); Buddhabhadra (359–429), a extraordinary meditation master famous for his miraculous powers; Seng-chao (384–414), a brilliant disciple of Kumarajiva; and Tao-sheng (c. 360–434), another capable follower of Kumarajiva who composed commentaries on many Mahayana texts. The translations into Chinese of texts that were brought from India were influenced by Taoism, an ancient Chinese religion dating to around the fourth century B.C.E., because Chinese translators turned to Taoism and its vocabulary to find notions equivalent to the abstract...

Share